


what are the roots that clutch

by ncfan



Series: Fictober 2018 [10]
Category: DuckTales (Cartoon 2017)
Genre: Child Neglect, Fictober 2018, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Lena speculates on what makes someone a person as opposed to a homunculus, POV Female Character, Pre-Canon, feat. Lena's existential angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-25
Updated: 2018-10-25
Packaged: 2019-08-07 14:09:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16409918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: So: what is that special spark that makes a person? [Written for Fictober 2018]





	what are the roots that clutch

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt, “Try harder next time.”
> 
> And, for what feels like the thousandth time, the title is taken from T.S. Eliot. Specifically from ‘The Burial of the Dead’ in _The Waste Land_ :
>
>>   
> What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow  
> Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,  
> You cannot say, or guess, for you know only  
> A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,  
> And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief  
> 

“This is ridiculous,” Aunt Magica said, as if she hadn’t already said it a _thousand_ times in what felt like a thousand different situations. You’d think once would be enough, but nope. “I created you from my shadow. You should have all of my knowledge; we shouldn’t be _doing_ this.”

Lena shrugged. It was all she could do, all she trusted herself to do. Her aunt’s temper was rendered somewhat impotent by lack of a corporeal form, but not completely, not by a long shot. “Yeah, well, your memories are _not_ in my head, so maybe concentrate a little more the next time you do something like that.”

The red slits that passed for Magica’s eyes narrowed. “Watch it,” she warned ominously. “We don’t want a repeat of last month, now do we?”

Lena couldn’t quite suppress a shudder. “No,” she said, too quickly for dignity, but sometimes, dignity was an at-best secondary concern.

Magica couldn’t absorb Lena back into her shadow (dragged down into oblivion) the way she was now, and certainly couldn’t muster the power to create another homunculus, one more to her liking in capabilities and personality. This left them at something of a stalemate as far as threats of renewed oblivion went. It did not leave them at a stalemate as far as everything else went.

“That’s better. Now, this is a simple potion, Lena, a _simple_ potion. You can get it right, can’t you?” Impatience didn’t edge into Magica’s voice quite so much as it stormed in, like the grating of a tree branch on sheet metal during a hurricane. “Really, a simple transfiguration potion. I could do this by the time I was ten, and your body looks years older than that.”

And was yet not ten years old, but Magica wouldn’t accept that as an excuse, had never accepted it as an excuse before. Lena turned her attention to the book of potions and an illustration she was trying very hard _not_ to look at, to the cauldron with a Bunsen burner positioned underneath, and the ingredients she needed. If prepared correctly, the potion would take on a glistening gold sheen, and allow the drinker to transform into anything she wished. Lena wondered darkly why it was that Magica had her learning _this_ potion above all others, but held her tongue. Shapes so often did not reflect reality. Reality was so often more complicated than basic definitions and surface impressions suggested.

She tried to concentrate. She really did, if only because Magica’s erratic, scattershot praise was better than her scolding. But she was too hungry. Magica was reduced to a shadow on the wall, and didn’t need to eat. Moreover, convincing her that Lena did feel hunger and did need to eat had been… difficult. _“You’re a homunculus. You’re made of shadow. You don’t need to eat, Lena; it’s only people who need to eat. Shadows don’t.”_

And yet, Lena was hungry, so very hungry, and hunger sapped her concentration and made her hands less steady than they might otherwise have been.

When she was done, Lena didn’t need to look to the shifting shadows that made up Magica’s face to guess at her reaction. Lena stared into the cauldron, into the sickly green pallor of its contents, and she knew.

“Ugh.” There was a miming of raising shadow hand to shadow forehead that was effectively only a loop of thin shadow acting as a bridge between two larger masses of shadow, like the handle of a teapot, close to boiling over. “What part of ‘a simple potion’ did you not understand?”

What little Lena knew about teaching came from the ever-growing succession of schools she’d been kicked out of. In at least some of those schools, her teachers had done more to teach her than just opening the book and telling her to follow the instructions. The one school where she’d taken a chemistry class had seen the teacher hovering over the students obsessively when they were conducting experiments. “I’m trying,” she ground out.

“Well, try _harder_ next time,” Magica snapped. “Ugh, I am _sick_ of trying to get knowledge past that thick skull of yours. Just… Just go entertain yourself. I’ll let you know when I’m ready for you to try again.”

It was, without a doubt, the best news Lena had gotten that day. She grabbed her winter coat (originally black, but long use was starting to turn it the gray of industrial smoke) and prepared to face the bracing wind outside. As she did so, her eyes fell on the page of the potion book she had been studying from.

This book came with illustrations on every page, and the illustration for this transfiguration potion was a silhouetted figure that Magica said was halfway through a transformation. That wasn’t what it looked like to Lena. To Lena, those flailing limbs and arched back and open mouth looked like nothing but the agony of obliteration.

-0-0-0-

_She hadn’t been able to speak, not at first. She’d learned much more quickly than a baby born the normal way would have done, but it had still been a struggle. Words were hard. Processing sensory signals when before she had been insensate shadow was hard. The substitute for the agony of birth._

_When she was able to form words with lips and tongue and teeth, she had first called Magica ‘Mother.’_

_Magica hadn’t liked that._

_Not one bit._

_Magica had eventually relented somewhat, not all of the way, and had told Lena to call her ‘aunt’ instead. Given her antipathy to the_ other _title, why she’d granted this concession, Lena had no idea. It sat in her brain, grating and out of place, like a tumor or a parasite or the seed of a nascent curse, waiting for the opportune moment to burst through her skull upon sprouting._

 _It was another year before Magica gave her creation/child/definitely_ not _her child a name, when she had decided that it was time for the referred to go to school. ‘Helena’ on the forged documents, and she couldn’t be bothered to care when Helena started calling herself ‘Lena’ instead_.

-0-0-0-

They moved around a lot, or perhaps it was more accurate to say that Lena moved around a lot, and Magica was along for the ride, telling her where to go and what to do once she got there. It was easy to just let the world dissolve into a blur of gray roads and rusting railways and green pastures. Easy to mix up names, too. Lena couldn’t remember the name of the city she was living in just now, hadn’t been living there long enough for the name to ingrain itself on the mind.

It did have a good hot dog stand, though.

The sky when she left portended a storm—angry pewter clouds roiled back and forth to reveal a bruised sky so blue it looked almost black. The wind was starting to pick up, cold tendrils that sank their claws into Lena’s skin, but she didn’t think it would rain for a few hours yet. She had a sense for such things, and right now sensed that the storm wouldn’t come until after night had fallen. In a way, Lena was glad for that. She liked the way the sky looked just before a storm, liked when it expressed its anger in ways no one could ignore, expressed its anger with complete impunity, for mortal man could do nothing more than shake their fist at the sky when it rained. For that to be drawn out over several hours… It was good. There was a vicious, vicarious joy in it.

Eating was something close to rapture, a burst of heat in her mouth that made her eyes sting with relieved tears. The flavors of bread and sausage, ketchup and mustard, pickles and shredded lettuce were beyond wonderful on her tongue. When Lena ate, she could understand, a little bit, why her aunt was so irritable. She’d never known how wonderful eating was until she was sent into the world. Having to live without it would have been hell.

Looking at an angry sky was wonderful. Eating a hot dog was wonderful. Everything else carried with it something that made nervous energy race under Lena’s skin, so fast and so hard that it occasionally brought nausea in its wake.

Lena didn’t wander around the city just in the dead of night, when the streets were all but deserted (Though not entirely; there was always an insomniac trying to walk off their excess energy, or a bunch of drunks trying to get home in one piece). She did need to sleep, after all, even if Aunt Magica did sometimes insist on waking her at three in the morning and expressed confusion over her exhaustion when she did so. Lena wandered around the city during the day, too, which meant coming across people who were out and about living their lives, which meant some greater or lesser degree of people-watching.

Being around people was confusing. It was a whole host of emotions tossed into a cauldron and left to stew until it boiled. She couldn’t show it. She didn’t know how to show it. They roiled and tore and screamed inside of her and there was no release valve, no means by which she could express it. The words died on her lips and the screams caught in knots in her throat. They withered and rotted and their corpses made it hard for her to breathe; they rattled and moaned like wind chimes answering a dusty wind when she spoke. No one could see it. Lena had always imagined they’d shy away from her if they could, that they’d avert their eyes with a shudder and walk a little faster to get away from her. They didn’t do these things; they must not be able to see it.

There was nothing on the surface that separated her from them. They ate, just as she did. They drank, just as she did. They laughed and smiled and sighed and cried the same way she did. They got cold and put on their coats, got hot and wore shorts and t-shirts, all just the same way she did. They just… lived their lives, and there might be more things _in_ their lives than there were in Lena’s, but still…

On the surface, Lena didn’t see anything that intrinsically separated her from them. She didn’t see anything that made them more of a person and her less, and she _had_ looked. Looked very hard for anything that could be an answer to what stormed inside of her.

If there was some sort of special spark that set people apart from something like her, it was buried deep inside, where no one had the means to see it. Not her, and not them, either. No one who interacted with her ever seemed to suspect that she was any less than what she claimed to be, that any of the vital pieces of a person were missing inside of her. If they were missing. Lena didn’t know, and ignorance offered no comfort. Aunt Magica certainly seemed to think she knew, but Lena wasn’t sure how much she could take from that source as true. Magica understood little about what she had created.

There was one thing that could separate her from them: Lena never aged, not even a little bit. Now, there were those who were people who didn’t age. If you picked up the right talisman, your aging would be slowed or halted, and Magica said that certain of the Greek gods lived on an island in the Aegean and hadn’t aged in thousands of years. But this, looking like a teenager every day of her life, this wasn’t normal, was it? If she was a normal person, he’d either have started out as a baby, or grown enough to look like an adult woman by now, the latter of which was what Lena suspected Magica actually wanted.

But she wasn’t put on this earth to grow up. She was put here to steal a dime, restore Magica to her body, and… Magica had promised her certain things. Maybe she would deliver. Lena wanted to believe she’d deliver, wanted to believe that years of loyalty and faithful service would be enough for her to—

Maybe it would be.

It had to be.

In the meanwhile, the normal people around Lena changed in normal ways while she stayed forever static, a closed loop of a person, if she was a person, where everything rebounded upon her needs that shouldn’t have been there and her inability to change. She suspected that the only way she could ever change was if someone, like taking a lump of wet clay, took her and—

“Lena.” The voice was quiet, as it ever was in public spaces, though there was still the rusty-metallic wrongness of vocalizations that should be impossible. “What on Earth are you doing all the way out here?” Magica went on in irritation, “I can call out to you at any time. You should stay closer to home.”

“I got hungry.”

“For the _last_ time, you _can’t_ get—“

A bolt of white-hot something shot through Lena at that, and she gritted her teeth and hissed hastily, “Okay, okay! You want me to try the potion again?” That potion of transformation, of agony and obliteration.

“Yes. Hurry back. You’re going to need a fair amount of light.”

As Lena walked back, she felt three fat, cold raindrops hit her face. The coldness of the water sent little shockwaves across her skin, and it looked like she could be wrong about this, after all.


End file.
